On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 10:12:41PM +0200, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
I strongly object to listing "sexual imagery" here unless accompanied by
a much longer list that includes violent imagery, imagery of aggressive
or otherwise dangerous animals, death, illness, medical imagery, and
whatever else people might find intimidating, say Fort Meade engulfed in
lightning in a violent thunderstorm and the eye of Sauron montaged on
top of it.
I think you will find that there would be those who would be quite
surprised by that last being considered "harassing language". Which
is ultimately the problem with trying to define harassment. Anyone
can be easily offended, and claim that they are offended just because
someone is wearing a "NSA: The only part of the government which
listens" T-shirt. Do we really want to litigate each and every
instance where someone feels that something is harassment?
In some ways, it's much easier to say that "sexual harassment" shall
not be tolerated, with the observation that it's much easier to for
people to agree that there is no place for any kind of sexual imagery
or reference or analogy in a professional computing meeting/event.
(This is ignoring the use of the terms "male" and "female" in
reference to things like RS-232 adapters, but we don't use them any
more, so we're probably OK. :-)
The moment the definition is widened to include any kind of
harassment, questions of definition start becoming very difficult. I
remember lots of anti-OSI comments being made many years ago (some
with a technical bent, some less so). Would that now be considered
harrassment if some ISO standardization folks were to step up and
complain?
Or how about discussions over failures of Certifying Authorities in
issuing bogus certificates, and how to fix it. Would discussion of
past failures of various public CA's be considered intimidating by
employees of those CA's?
- Ted